Making Lemonade from Lemons: A non-sewing project...

 Two years ago I looked at my Christmas lights...cheap ones from Hobby Lobby...and realized there's way too much purple in them.  It kinda made the whole house look bluish/purple...we had snow on Jan 2 (following the high of 70 degrees then storms with tornado warnings on Jan 1), so I actually have a real, Christmas-looking picture here (This is RARE in Alabama...):

So last year I went in search of some nice red, white and green lights.  I found some that were recommended by a friend...pretty, tear-drop shaped lights.  Ordered 7 strings to begin the switchover processes; can't afford to buy all the lights at once, lol.   I put them on the bushes and left the Hobby Lobby lights on the railing.

But before we took those lights down, about 3 strings of those lights on the bushes had half the string dark.  And when we did take them down, a number of the pretty bulbs HAD WATER IN THEM. And, the teardrops were glass...pretty fragile glass...and a few were broken.  A few more broke because they tapped each other as we were moving the lights around. Yes, the lights were rated for indoor/ outdoor use.  Obviously, though, they weren't up to the elements.  We spent a day plugging and unplugging lights and managed to get all but two of the strings working again but I can't put them outside and, TBH, I'm not sure they will work if we plug them in this year.

So I began another search for red/green/white LED lights for the front of the house.  I have been looking since, oh, I dunno, July or August, for said lights.  And have found nothing.    Or at least, nothing I wanted; there were some that had, like, lime-green lights....nope.

With time running out, we went to Lowe's.  Where I bought two strings of white, two strings of red, and two strings of green LED lights with the intention of just switching the dadgum lights around and make my own red/white/green light strings.

So, instead of doing the Christmas sewing that needs doing on my day off (since Veteran's Day was Saturday) today...I switched lightbulbs in half the string sets.

That was way more complicated than it should have been.  Turns out each string has five light sockets/ bulb bases that are larger than the other 95, so I had to be careful to NOT put a regular bulb into one of the larger ones; it doesn't make contact and the string won't light.  I finally wised up and started marking the off-sized sockets and the bulb bases with a sharpie marker.  I have a LED light repair kit, which includes a 'bulb puller'... a skinny little rounded fork thing to pop off the lights.  It helped quite a lot, actually, but my fingers are still sore.  I'll probably do the rest of them later this week, but now that I'm onto the peculiarities it should go faster than it did today.

I'm even thinking about buying some white lights from Hobby Lobby, to match the multicolored lights, and just switching out the purple lightbulbs; I think that will help warm up the garland.  Might even be good enough that I won't have to switch the lightstrings on the garland.

Then I can decide what to do about the holly bushes in front of the porch...lol.

A PS....I went to add the labels and realized I had typed the whole post ON THE WRONG BLOG.  

Copied all the HTML and pasted it in here, then deleted the other one...

Yup.  It's Monday...